Next week is Book Week.
Here’s what Connie Smith from Bookgrove, Ocean Grove is reading and what her favourites are.
What are you currently reading?
Forty Nights – Pirooz Jafari
Sadie Starr’s Guide to Starting Over – Miranda Luby
How to Spell Catastrophe – Fiona Wood
I run the book clubs here at Bookgrove and these are three local authors we’re reading for this month (the three adult groups are reading the same book). I’m also working my way through Emily St John Mandel’s backlist. I just finished Sea of Tranquility and Station Eleven. I really enjoy her writing style and the topics she chooses to discuss in her fiction. I’m also getting into the foraging so I have my copy of Wild Mushrooming by Alison Pouliot and Tom May or my copy of Eat Weeds by Diego Bonetto that I’m flicking through constantly.
Favourite childhood book?
The Magic Faraway Tree – Enid Blyton
I wanted to be Moonface! I wasn’t impressed that the character of Connie was made out to be so snobby and self centred though.
Hatchet – Gary Paulsen.
I read this when I was 11 and it made me fall in love with the idea of the wilderness and all that you can discover about yourself out there.
Favourite book of all time?
I don’t enjoy this question – I like reading everything. I do really love Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer which is a biography about a young man who ultimately gave himself to the wilderness to see if he could obtain some kind of transcendence. It just opens your eyes up to different ways of thinking about yourself and your place in society, capitalism, colonialism and beyond.
What do you think are the benefits of reading?
Reading is communication, which I think is fundamental to human interaction and health. It’s fantastic when younger readers come in and discuss books with us, we love it. We can learn different perspectives or different opinions. I’m halfway through my Masters in Creative Writing and the ways in which words and writing can inform and shape people is so powerful.
What genre is your favourite?
For a long time I loved fantasy and anything magical. These days I really like experimental fiction or creative writing that blurs the lines between genres – something like Hovering by Rhett Davis, amazing.
